Good Housekeeping

Goodhousekeeping Blog

This trailer park was built in the 1950s as a fisherman's park -- complete with a little brick "hut" dedicated to fish cleaning. Two sinks, fillet boards, light bulbs, stacks of old newspapers. Bring your own knife and plastic bags. 

I inherited three tubs of tomato and squash plants from two vegetable-and-pot-growing buddies (one of them has a prescription) who left Shady Rest and moved out of town to Benton. Scraggly, the left-behind tubs are farmed by ants who use them to pasture aphids. I have gotten gorgeous yellow squash flowers (no squashes) and delicious sweet tomatoes. The two buddies pulled out after a full-throated, foul-mouthed shouting match with the trailer park owner, over a shed. Since most residents have a storage shed in their trailer spaces, the buddies demanded to also be allowed to install one. I didn't understand what the fuss was about until their new shed arrived on a flatbed truck; bigger than my trailer, with a floor, windows and a double-plated door -- a proper cabin -- put to use as a sunlamp-powered greenhouse for cannabis plants. 

Winford feeds cats, racoons and skunks ("aren't they pretty?") outdoors on his screened front porch, or decking area, running the length of this single-wide trailer. Recently there was a midnight shoot-out between the racoons and the skunks. Hard to say who finally held the floor, but for the next seven days Winford's deck reeked from skunk spray. He stamped around the porch swearing he'd never feed them ungrateful critters again. It seems to me the cats won--now they get fed indoors. 

Upgrades to trailer sanctuary:

New Curtains! thanks to dear friend Barbara Cortese, who helped me pick out the fun Japanese parasol retro motif fabric and sew them together, complete with lining! -- in a marathon session at her home during my birthday visit there in July. Thank you, Barbara.

Shiny new screen in my screen door, thanks to Winford's expertise.

"Shed" for my painting frames and materials. the vertical file inherited from Inkworks Press, from the old pre-digital copy camera dark room. An antique!

It feels like it's been a short summer. The trees are beginning to turn at the higher lakes, and noontimes are cooler.   hope to have pictures of fall color for my next blog.

Fishing Update: Grand Total Trout caught and et: 15

GONE FISHIN'

Tonight we cooked the ten rainbow trouts caught yesterday out of an aluminum rowboat at Little Virgiinia Lake in Mono County, just north of Mono Lake off of 395, five apiece, the limit. Baked on a gas grill, wrapped in tinfoil, stuffed with basil and butter.  OK, I'm hooked.

My first fishing lesson: Up at 5 am to meet Winford at his truck, loaded rods, worms, tackle, snacks. Got breakfast in Lee Vining.  I was fine with the casting (I'm good at throwing things; bocce balls, darts, frisbees....) but flunked hooking worms,  mostly due to the superior squirm capability of Eastern Sierra nightcrawlers, and somewhat due to my squeamish feelings about sticking hooks in them. I'm fine with the cleaning thing, but need to develop greater hand strength in order to rip out the guts quickly and cleanly.

This happy adventure was generously financed and supported by:

Steve Skaar, who, upon hearing of my impending move to the Eastern Sierra last year, immediately donated a fishing rod and reel.

Bill and Judy Valladao, who bought me a fishing license for my 62nd birthday (July 21 this year).

Winford Flud, who fixed the broken-off tip of the fishing rod, advised me how to get new line wound on the reel, took me shopping for the various bits and parts, gave me a tackle box he won in a derby raffle, fixed my line when I tangled it up, tied up a second hook when the really big fish got away with the first one, refreshed my bait, and netted my catches when I was half-hysterical with excitement while hanging on to the jumping splashing energetic wild life form trying to yank the pole out of my hands.

Many, many thanks!

Painting Update: SOLD

Yes! A very nice, highly intelligent, and generous Eastern Sierra Land Trust supporter from the Hollywood Hills bought two of my winter trees paintings. Me and the ESLT shared the revenues 50/50.  Hilda's real appreciation of my unusual pictures (unusual when displayed next to more naturalistic landscapes) was a jolt of joy for me — and the cash came at a good time. Below are the two paintings that sold. The winter blue cottonwood trunks is a personal favorite of mine.

The fundraiser art show was housed in a large retail business suite between a movie theater and a chocolatier in the Minaret shopping center in Mammoth Lakes. It was well done, and I admire the organization and hard work by the folks at ESLT that made it happen.  I was too dizzy from success to check out the chocolate, but may yet do so if I return around Thanksgiving for a similar show to be sponsored by Mono Council for the Arts. 

Here's a horse from a new series of dusk paintings I've just begun. Actually this one is based on photos I took during late evening strolls through Point Pinole in Richmond during the early nineties. Yeah, the moon does rise like a little white ping pong ball. I'm developing my palette colors to capture scenes from my  twilight walks along the canal here in Bishop. 

BONUS PHOTO:  When smoke from Sierra fires loads the air with particle, the sunsets mix it with light and use it for paint (looking EAST along the canal)

Shady Rest Trailer Paradise

After a pleasant visit to Venice Beach area in Los Angeles, house-sitting and gallery-cruising for two weeks, I returned to Bishop and moved my trailer into Shady Rest Trailer Paradise in the northeast corner of Bishop, between City Park and the Canal. I have a concrete slab for a front porch and am hooked up to electricity, cold city water and sewer, with showerhouse privileges and a small storage shed. It's the Ritz!

A  major amenity is Winford Flud, general manager and Vietnam Vet (for real), pictured here watering flowers. He has planted flowers all over the park and keeps the place green. He encourages potted gardens and tomatoes, corn, lettuce and cucumbers  flourish amongst aluminum sidings. One afternoon when he returned from a fishing expedition (note sunburned legs) he fried up the new trout with all the other trout stashed in his freezer and handed it out to everyone in the trailer park. It was delicious. He told me he'd teach me to fish for trout if I bought a fishing license. I told him that if I sold a painting I'd buy a fishing license ($50). 

Winford scrounged me a small fridge, a fan, extension cords, and some frames to fix up for my paintings from his extensive holdings in converted container storage lockers down by the airport.  I bought parts at ACE and he fixed my interior water plumbing, gratis. He runs his giant TV and air conditioning all day for anyone who cares to walk in and sit for awhile. When the temp bakes up over 100, I look for a movie in his cabinets and flop on his couch drinking his gatorade. We share watermelons.  

Typical conversation-in-passing:

Winford;   HEY. YOU. whattayathinkyerdoin'?

Inna:  laundry.

Winford:  goddam.

Owens Valley is very green this summer, hot and green and the canal is running high from the last snow melting fast. I like to walk along the canal in the evening when fish jump, air cools down, and sunset colors sky and hills.

NEWS FLASH: Apparently I have in fact sold a painting at the ESLT fundraiser art show in Mammoth, so I may have a fishing blog soon. . . .Next blog will be about the paintings.

Tossup and Seven-come-11 Throwing Blank, Round Dice.

Thickets bristle from rooted centers. Spikey, thatched, like bottle brushes or porcupines, but instead of sea urchin forms, I saw kimonos and reed-capes hatch across my page, throwing down round blank dice at the edge of an autumn field.

Painting about Kanzan and Jittoku (Japanese), or Han Shan and Shih-te (Chinese); they are characters from the Buddhist tradition.  

Read more at:

http://www.coldbacon.com/hanshan.html

http://www.hermetica.info/hanshan.htm

Remember drapery?

Flowing swirls and tucks, swathing bodies, piling up on chairs and floors?  Cottonwood bark sheathes white cottonwood core wood in rough draperies, flowing along branches and around burls.

Prismacolor pencil on watercolor underpainting. Easy to scratch up on a dinky, wobbling table in a tight-squeeze trailer dinette, jolting in blustery late winter weather.

Having fun!

Fixing My Trailer with Big Jim

Jim is a nice guy trying to recover from his most recent nasty divorce by camping out on LA Department of Water and Power land, picking up odd jobs and putting bicycles together out of dump junk and spare parts. Last winter when it was freezing I bought him some propane and gave him an old tent, and he figured he owed me. So he stayed a few days with me in Pleasant Valley campground, fixing lots of stuff on my scrappy old trailer, showing me how to scour the dump (photo) for parts, and being a fun companion. 

A buddy of his gave us some venison and he cooked it in the coals of our campfire, telling me rambling stories about great road meals: once he traveled with a woman who pinched an entire prime rib roast from a market, wrapped it up tightly in 25 feet of barbed wire borrowed from a fence, and just tossed it onto a big log in the middle of a campfire -- said it was the best roast beef he has ever eaten.  We scrounged for free firewood  from the constantly rotting and renewing willow and cottonwood forests in all the pasturelands. He grabs huge half-rotted willow logs and then smashes them up on the roadway to break them into pieces small enough to stuff into my crate. (photos)  He has a slingshot and one night chased a racoon around my trailer for awhile until it swam the river. He slept out on riverside grass wrapped in three sleeping bags stuffed inside each other with a thick fuzzy little girl's hat on his balding head.

In the dump we found replacement louvres for the windows, a grill to use cooking on the fire, a broiler pan for my dinky trailer oven, a picture frame, and a huge stash of perfectly OK canned food in one of the trailers -- lots of canned fish especially.  He checked out the wrecked bicycles, and found the stripped-out and smashed van of someone he had known on the street:  "Cat Lady." He said the civil authorities took her away to an "institution."  She was old and had 22 cats in that van. He warned me not to open the doors, but I did anyway and the stench was sickening.  I found an 18ft aluminum boat with just one dinged side that I really wanted to take home -- but he said it was beyond his powers to fix. We have a tentative plan to visit the Motherlode RV Dump in Benton out on Hiway 6 and find me a new rock shield--if he doesn't move to Gardnerville in the warming weather.

The river is rising as the Big Snows melt. I now have two of my recent paintings hanging in the Inyo Council for the Arts Gallery on Main Street (395 thru town). I hope to move back into Horton Creek for May, back home to the wind, the rats and the fabulous views.  

Happy Easter!

NEW PAINTINGS: Winter Trees, Mostly Cottonwoods

New paint-drawings done end of February into March, mostly while camped in Baker Creek Campground west of Big Pine. Cottonwood trunks stand shabbily in clouds of sucker shoots stripped of leaves, or carrying a few dried ochre leaves from the fall when they were deep yellow. New shoots sprout and slowly turn colors of magenta, brick, purple, graygreen. Now April and these gray trees are sprouting clouds of soft pale greens. 

(double-click to enlarge)